For 16 years, Elizabeth Conroy had been slowly suffocating in her Pollyanna straightjacket, when circumstances dealt her a crushing blow. Gone was the laughter and the life she had known as bitterness and anger bit into her soul. She knew she had to escape the city and all she had held dear before she emotionally festered to death.

Looking like a vagrant, Elizabeth roamed the Queensland hinterland, not at all sure that life had any value. But one thing she was sure of, no one would ever push her around again.

When Patrick Ryan reluctantly came to Australia as a ten pound migrant, he never dreamt he would exchange the soft, misty days of the Emerald Isle for the blistering heat of the Queensland hinterland. Nor could he imagine how his family in Ireland, with their 12 acre plot, could become emotionally entangled with the wealthy Davidsons on the 90,000 acre, Glamorgan Station.